PlasticElephant1

Sorry for the slow reply, just checked back in here again - and don't really know how to use RIO forums so gonna quote some of what you said, hopefully it's readable :pray:

I've sometimes looked at my samples zoomed in and thought damn I suck or I'm a god (but knowing its variance in small sample) until I zoom out and see that even a winrate of 2-3bb/100 is good $ over big enough hand sample.

Yeah 100%, I also think your results are very good anyway given the amount of battles you play in.
I think very few people can crush battles for more than 3bb systematically, and when you sort lists of biggest winners and see people who do have better results, you do sort for variance to some degree too.

If there were 100 players, and you could sort by runhot somehow, you wouldn't be surprised to see outlier results from the top guy, and if you sort by winnings to a large degree you are selecting for the same thing, because someone did have a top 1% run.

Also agree 2-3bb is a ton of EV$, the one problem I have with expecting low WRs personally is that I think the variance around a low WR can make it harder to execute for long periods, whereas trying to maintain 5+ with a bit more selection makes getting to 3million hands easier.

I find that the pros I've met over the years who fizzle out and quit all share two qualities: not enough volume and not enjoying the game, seeing it purely as a job. Even those that had worked actively in groups quit due to those reasons

Yeah I agree here. I think poker in EU pools is tough enough now that you can't succeed if you don't have some passion beyond purely making $$.
In a way, it makes sense too, we are playing a game where anyone in the world can log on and sit and make 100s of thousands per year, we should expect the standard to be very high and the levels required to be exceptional.

I might consider the benefits of working in a team more though as my ex-coach does seem to be a bit of an anomaly in his opinion, I hear most top HS regs work in small teams (Linus+MBF, Nacho Davy etc)

Yeah I can only speak from my own experience, and my own nosebleed shots didn't go so well :D

Markus though actually did do the majority of study alone, and he always had the ability to just sit down and study for hours and not get distracted.
He'd always be completely spamming people on discord and skype with hands questions and comments though, including way worse players than himself (I actually banned him from doing it because it was too overwhelming, but everytime a new bitB coach joins they get hooked with Markus spam for a few weeks until they too burnout :D)
But I think like you said originally, there are definitely people for who doing the majority of their study and work solo can work, and a group helping you is quite dependent on it being a high quality group too.
But poker is such a vast game, that having at least some mechanism to share ideas and research helps a lot with iteration towards a better gameplan, even if the majority of work is done alone.

Looking forward to following this anyway, you write very well, glgl going forward.

Feeling motivated to write a response to the above post, so here goes my attempt to defend group work :D

Let's talk a bit about bias firstly - you are someone who has been quite successful working primarily on your own, my network has been successful almost always working in some kind of group, so it's always going to be hard for either one of us to escape this bias - but for either of us to say that 'it's a waste of time to study in a group/alone' would seem too strong an opinion to hold.

As a basic appeal to the benefit of group work, in my house alone, I guess there are 20M in winnings where most of the strategy has been developed together, excluding CFP winnings which also obviously have a heavy community aspect.

The more I play poker the more I become convinced that sustainable success is highly dependent on being able to show up consistently for multiple years. Making it to a big lifetime sample at mid/HS, even with a relatively low WR, leaves you in a good financial situation, whereas smaller samples have insane variance around how things can go.

Whether it's placebo or not, having a community of others who are executing a similar strategy, supporting you when things are going bad, hyping you when things are going well, putting in volume of work and study and motivating you to do the same, makes the journey so much more fun and easy to stick to.
Groups have a habit of identifying the really horrible ideas early on and weeding them out, where individual ego can leave you sticking to them much longer.

Working a bit worse, but keeping it up for long enough to reap real results, will always beat working really well for a short time; Consistency beats intensity.

I see a lot of blogs where people are convinced they've found the golden recipe, but poker is a game of grey areas, there are always multiple ways to play/ study that are effective, and if someone finds something that works for them, they show up and put in volume which generates them life changing money over a period I'll always respect that almost regardless of the process - there are definitely a lot of people who worked on their own too and did very well in the game.

But 350k hands isn't a lot in poker to draw such extreme conclusions, and ime it's always been better to keep a semi open mind.